Saturday, October 16th is the Seth Boyden Harvest Festival!! Please volunteer to make the day really special! Volunteer HERE!

Saturday, October 16th is the Seth Boyden Harvest Festival!! Please volunteer to make the day really special! Volunteer HERE!
Our Harvest Fest was once again a fantastic day!
We owe a huge thanks to Sabena Khan and Lysna Marzani for organizing the entire event, and to the many families who helped with food, games, activities, setup and clean up!
The MAC scholars from CHS, many of whom were Seth Boyden alums, also volunteered and were incredibly helpful. It was great to have them back!
Check out our photos, courtesy of Anna Herbst, Carrie Puglisi and Alison Poe, on our Facebook page.
This is always one of the best days of our year, and we need your help to make it a success!
Harvest Fest is coming up FAST — Oct. 13 — and there are a million fun and very, very rewarding jobs to volunteer for, so what are you waiting for?
Hit the Sign Up Genius and sign up!
Susan Holtz can’t do it all herself!
Our annual Cupcake Contest and Bake Sale is happening at Harvest Fest on Saturday, October 14.
To enter, please make at least a dozen cupcakes and bring them to the dessert booth before 1pm. (One will be entered in the contest, and we’ll sell the rest to raise money for the PTA!)
Prizes will be awarded for taste and presentation, so start planning your entry now!
It’s almost here! Our annual Harvest Festival is Saturday, Oct. 14, from noon to 4pm!
All your favorite activities will be back, including games, pony rides, painting pumpkins, creating fairy houses, making god’s eyes, and other fun projects for the whole family.
And of course it wouldn’t be a Harvest Festival without the mouth-watering fall delicacies prepared by our own Seth Boyden families. As always, we’ll have the delicious and fun cupcake contest, and many different kinds of chili. (Vegetarian,too!)
There will also be a raffle for exclusive experiences with some of our wonderful teachers. We’ll have the whole range of Seth Boyden merchandise available for sale, including sweatshirts and sweatpants for cooler weather.
We can’t do all of this without YOUR help! Please volunteer for a shift (or two). It’s easy — and fun!
Sign up to help with crafts and games, staff the tables, and cook or bake.
We look forward to seeing you next Saturday! (If necessary, the rain date will be the following week, Saturday, Oct. 21.)
Here are two great ways you can help out in the Outdoor Learning Center.
Fall Clean-Up Day, Sunday, Oct. 8, 1-5pm
This fall clean-up day is an annual event where we need as many people as possible to spend a few minutes or a few hours to get the school yard tidied up before the Oct. 14 Harvest Festival. As a bonus this year, the Rutgers Cooperative Extension will be sending us some master gardeners who will work side-by-side with us and will answer your gardening questions. Sign Up for a Shift
Daily Setup in the Outdoor Classroom
Here is a quick, easy way that you can help with outdoor learning at Seth Boyden. We need people to put the stools and umbrellas out in the Outdoor Classroom each day and put them away at the end of the day. This is a super easy, quick job that has a huge impact! You just need to move the stools 10 feet. This is a great way to volunteer if you are already dropping your child off at school and picking them up in the afternoon. Sign Up for a Shift
We had another great Harvest Festival this year! We owe a huge thanks to Susan Holtz, Tia Swanson, Tara Benigno, Marian Ezell and all of our other volunteers who worked so hard to make this special day happen.
Here’s Alison Poe’s story from the district website:
Crowds of families – and even Maplewood mayor Victor DeLuca – gathered in Seth Boyden’s sprawling Outdoor Learning Center for the school’s ninth annual Harvest Festival this past Saturday, October 15.
An array of fall-themed activities, crafts, and games greeted the hundreds of attendees. The Montclair Art Museum Art Truck hosted leaf and stick decorating, and parent volunteers staffed tables for painting pumpkins, making fairy houses, and pickling cucumbers from the school vegetable garden. Kids played football, competed in friendly sack races, and flocked to a bounce house with inflatable slide. Pony Share of Morristown provided a steady stream of pony rides. The school’s favorite DJ, district Spanish teacher Stephen Carberry, spun a wide mix of tunes, from Depeche Mode to salsa to the Jackson Five.
Food was abundant, as always. More than a dozen Seth Boyden parents brought crocks of chili prepared with the school’s signature recipe. Principal Damion Frye manned the grill. Among the myriad homemade baked goods, the many trays of cupcakes were standouts, submitted for a contest judged by Mayor DeLuca and Principal Frye. Cupcake toppers included wide-eyed owls and marshmallow-headed skeletons.
The festival took full advantage of the school’s new three-part Outdoor Classroom, completed earlier this year. The stools and tables of the main teaching space offered places for families to sit, chat, and work on crafts. In the performance circle, kids donned costumes for a photo booth; in the art nook, they drew on the concrete pavement in sidewalk chalk.
“This event celebrates so much of what makes Seth Boyden such a wonderful school,” said Susan Holtz, a Seth Boyden parent and one of the organizers of the festival. “It’s the small things that make it special: children and parents spending time in the crisp fall air, and everyone working together to turn tiny pieces of nature into beautiful crafts, delicious food, and fun games. It cannot come together without the help of the whole community, and the fact that it does, every year, is amazing.”
Our PTA is still looking to fill a few positions, and we’re looking for parents to chip in.
Among the areas where we need help are preschool outreach, yearbook, bake sales, variety show, Harvest Festival and Garden Committee. Please review the complete list on the link below and find a spot that fits your talents. We need all the help we can get to make our school a great place for our children!
Don’t forget to sign up — right now — for a shift (or two) at the Harvest Festival. We needs lots of people to work booths, making sure that we can offer cool games, crafts, and learning experiences. We can only have as many activities as we have helpers, so this can’t happen without you! We also need bakers and cooks.
We’ll have pumpkins, crafts, fairy houses, ponies, a bouncy house, popcorn, cupcakes and, well, lots and lots of fun for the whole family. Some people, in fact, say it’s their very favorite day of the year!
Don’t miss it on Saturday, Oct. 15, from noon to 4.
Sign up to help here: SignUpGenius.com/go/70A044AA5AC2BA31-2016
See all the great photos from Seth Boyden’s annual Harvest Festival, which was held on October 17. A huge crowd enjoyed great food, an obstacle course, a bouncy house, the Montclair Art Museum’s Art Truck, pony rides and more.